ABSTRACT
Thus far, this book has been concerned mainly with orientalism's Orient as an arena for poetic experimentation, especially experimentation at the boundaries of mimesis. The current chapter, in contrast, probes the qualities that enabled the Orient to serve this important purpose throughout the nineteenth century and thereby to displace nature as a poetic origin. Specifically, I will argue that the Orient's perceived unnaturalness is the crucial feature that produces the Orient as an amimetic locus. In this respect, my argument will diverge from that of Saree Makdisi, who sees nature (chiefly defined as the outdoor environment) and the Orient as instances of "anti-modern otherness" — "selfenclosed and self-referential enclaves of the anti-modern" — that operate in parallel as places of shelter from the anxieties of modernization.1 Although there is no doubt that both the Orient and nature stand apart from modernity and its processes, it is also important to take into account the interaction between these two entities. As this chapter will show, nature and the East function in opposition to one another aesthetically, even if, as Makdisi proposes, they are at the same time working in tandem as counterpoints to the modern. Although the Orient and nature are each capable of serving as a poetic origin, they generate disparate poetics. Using William Wordsworth's articulation of the oppositional relationship between European nature and Middle Eastern nature as a point of departure, I will show how a range of nineteenth-century poets — Felicia Remans, Charles Leconte de Lisle, Theophile Gautier, Matthew Arnold, and Alfred Tennyson — develop this relationship, often as the basis for an alternative to mimesis.
